Universal Postal Service

Debate between Mike Weir and Mike Crockart

Thursday 17th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Weir]

The right hon. Gentleman is being typically ridiculous. The universal service is under threat not because of Scottish independence but because of what is happening in this House. It is under threat now—that is what Royal Mail is saying to us—and it is privatisation, supported by him and his colleagues, that is leading to that. Under independence we have committed to bring Royal Mail operations in Scotland back under public ownership, where they should have stayed, and ensure that there is a Royal Mail service in Scotland. If we stay in the Union, we are told not only that we may not have a universal service, but that prices may go up and things may disappear. The right hon. Gentleman should consider a bit more before making such daft interventions.

[Mike Crockart]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Weir]

No, I have had enough from the Liberals—[Interruption.]

Nuisance Calls

Debate between Mike Weir and Mike Crockart

Thursday 16th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mike Crockart]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and there are two issues raised. Of course, the vast majority of calls coming from outside the UK are made on behalf of companies operating within the UK, so they should be covered by the regulators. The difficulty is that there are all sorts of problems identifying where those calls have come from and getting the calling line identity to ensure that they can be traced. I hope that the Minister will have something to say later about how he is looking to deal with the various difficulties.

The complexity of the regulation leads to a lack of focus and, therefore, to a lack of action. I welcome the Minister’s involvement, however, which has helped to deal with the first. We will see shortly whether it is helping to deal with the second, as well.

In the all-party group’s inquiry, we made a number of attempts to come to a final assessment of the scale of the problem, but the vast array of inconsistent data makes that difficult. The regulators receive about 6,000 complaints a month about nuisance calls. Ofcom reports that it receives about 3,000 relating to silent calls, and since setting up its online reporting tool in March 2012, the Information Commissioner’s Office has received about 240,000 complaints about unsolicited calls and texts. There is no evidence that the problem is decreasing. The ICO, Ofcom and the Telephone Preference Service all report an overall growth in the number of complaints over the past three years, but complaints data alone fail to tell us the full story. As part of its “Calling Time” campaign, Which? set up a web portal to direct consumer complaints to the relevant regulator.

[Mr Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman may recall that when BT gave evidence to the all-party group, it said that its complaints and nuisance calls line received some 65,000 calls a month—from memory, I think that was the figure. If so many calls are coming in but so few are going to the regulator, that suggests that there is a serious problem and that there is no confidence that the regulator will do much about them.

[Mike Crockart]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, although I am not sure whether the failure to complain results just from a lack of confidence. Part of it may well be a lack of knowledge and a lack of willingness to commit time to go through the process of making a complaint. However, I was about to make the point that he raises.

Data from the portal that Which? set up showed that only about half the people who used it went on to make a full complaint to the regulators. As the hon. Gentleman says, the number of nuisance calls received far exceeds the number of official complaints. BT estimates that its nuisance call bureau receives about 50,000 calls a month— that is the figure I have, which is bad enough. There are also nuisance texts, and in the evidence that the all-party group received, the technology company Pinesoft estimated that about 8.7 million are sent every day.

Ofcom’s omnibus survey is generally considered to produce the most accurate estimate of the number of nuisance calls that people receive, because it involves people making a diary of the calls that they receive for a certain period. It has resulted in an estimate that consumers who experience unwanted calls receive an average of about two a week, with four out of five participants receiving at least one nuisance call during the four-week research period. About a quarter of people recalled receiving more than 10 calls in a four-week period. However one calculates it, the annual number of unwanted calls is almost certainly more than 1 billion.

Another recent piece of research was commissioned by StepChange, a debt charity, and conducted by YouGov. It found that more than 3.2 million British adults who had received an unsolicited marketing call or text had been left afraid to answer the phone as a result of those communications.